November 5 – December 19, 2015Opening on First Thursday, November 5, 6:00 to 8:00pmArtist talk Saturday, November 21 at 12:00pm

THE WORK

Drawing inspiration from calligraphy, flow blue ceramics, and the Pattern and Decoration movement, Green’s work meditates on the ocean, consumption, the color blue, and airbrushed imagery. For artist Julie Green’s first solo exhibition at Upfor, two hundred sheets of mulberry paper, each laboriously hand-painted in sumi ink with thousands of sea shells, covers the gallery walls. This process-based drawing (begun in 2010) serves as a backdrop for a series of paintings that employ airbrushed egg tempera, an unusual and challenging technique. The porcelain in the gallery window is a Noritake dinner service for 12 that the artist inherited from her grandmother. Green painted over the original pattern, and on the backside, inscribed each with a moment of awkwardness or discomfort from the her personal history, using a mixture of blue pigment, 7-Up and simple syrup. To stabilize this work, the dishes were kiln fired by technical assistant Toni Acock. Finally, the antique ledgers are re-purposed as a personal record and resource for the artist, comprising an exhaustive visual diary of Green's daily life dating back to 1993.

THE ARTIST

Julie Green (b. 1961 in Yokosuka, Japan) wanted to be a stewardess until age four, but became a painter instead. Green’s work has been featured in The New York Times, a Whole Foods mini-documentary, National Public Radio, Ceramics Monthly, Gastronomica, and 7th edition of A World of Art published by Prentice Hall. She has exhibited widely in the US and internationally, and is a 2011 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Half of each year, usually in winter months, she works on The Last Supper, an ongoing project about the death penalty in the United States. Green lives in the Willamette Valley and is a professor at Oregon State University.